Podcast Ep 242: Starting with his grandmother’s Yaris, a bucket and a squeegee, Luke Joyce has built The Cleaning Company into a nationwide enterprise with digital platform plans.
Some entrepreneurs are just born this way. 28-year-old Luke Joyce, founder and managing director of TheCleaningCompany.ie, is not afraid of hard graft and while his fascination with entrepreneurship was honed in a digital age, getting his hands wet and dirty to make hard-earned cash was not something he shied away from.
He started his business TheCleaningCompany.ie armed with only his grandmother’s Toyota Yaris, a bucket and a squeegee.
“I started with no money, really. All I had was €50 worth of borrowed equipment and my granny’s Toyota Yaris”
The business is now expanding nationwide driven by year-on-year 100% increases in revenue.
He spoke with the ThinkBusiness Podcast about his passion for entrepreneurship, including winning Maynooth University Entrepreneur of the Year, and his plans for growth.
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Born and raised on a farm in the Dublin Mountains, Luke’s entrepreneurial spirit was honed from an early age, inspired by the tenacity of farm life and a passion for innovation.
A high achiever from the outset, he graduated from Maynooth University in 2019 with first-class honours in his Entrepreneurship degree, securing top grades for his year. His exceptional performance and vision for enterprise earned him the prestigious title of Maynooth University Entrepreneur of the Year that same year.
Joyce launched Ireland’s first subscription window cleaning service in 2020,which fuelled rapid growth for the company. With headquarters based on his family farm and utilising pure spring mountain water from his own land, Joyce combines innovation with sustainability.
The business, he says, is solving the problem of homeowners worrying about the exterior maintenance of their home. By creating Ireland’s first window and gutter cleaning subscription service, The Cleaning Company provides a set-and-forget solution to this problem.
“There are 1.85m occupied dwellings in Ireland at present; this being the size of the market we are addressing.”
Joyce explained how the subscription cleaning service works. “The client joins our subscription service for a clean every six weeks (eight cleans a year) or 12 weeks (four cleans a year). We then automatically call on the requested frequency, sending a text and email the day before, the customer leaves access available for our team, we clean and the customer is then charged 3-5 days later via Direct Debit.
“The customer then has the option to add other external maintenance services to their subscription, such as gutter cleaning, fascia cleaning, solar panel cleaning or power washing. This creates a completely hassle-free solution for the customer.”
Entrepreneurship is in the blood
Entrepreneurship is in Joyce’s blood. His grandmother Kitty Joyce is the proprietor of the Cleo knitwear and design shop on Kildare Street, Dublin.
“I was always around an entrepreneurial kind of environment. My dad owns a farm but he also has other business interests like property. My granny ran Cleo on Kildare Street and she used to have a team of knitters up on the mountain here on the farm. My aunt runs that business now. So it’s a family of entrepreneurs and I was raised around that. There was never a question that I was going to go into it too.
“On the farm there was always scrap metal and pallets and bits of pieces I’d be working on with my dad as well as selling cattle. When I left school I knew I wanted to do my own thing and have my own business.”
While at college Joyce entered the working world, initially trying his hand at working in the pharmaceutical industry, on a part-time basis. “I didn’t last very long. I decided I needed to do something with flexible hours and I needed a few bob for buying pints at college. So I picked up window cleaning.”
His own experiences of trying to source a window cleaner for his parents’ house whereby cleaners failed to show up at all, made him consider applying his entrepreneurial chops to solve the problem by creating an online booking system.
“I started with no money, really. All I had was €50 worth of borrowed equipment and my granny’s Toyota Yaris.”
He somehow managed to squeeze a foldable ladder into the small car and went to work. “I got started by knocking on doors and it grew from there.”
His advice to fellow founders is quite simple: “Stick with the first few years of hell. Give it everything you have, and you will come out the other side.”
And it was tough at he start. “It was a difficult process. I never had a proper job before, except for the pharma one that lasted about three weeks. I didn’t know anything about management or how it was structured. So that was a big challenge. But once I got a handle on it I started rolling out to do jobs anywhere within an hour of our yard in south-west Dublin. We started going as far as Meath, Louth, Kildare and Wicklow.”
The Cleaning Company now has 30 cleaners on the road at any one time and having overcome the management and technology challenge, it has built a system that could allow the company to go not only nationwide but eventually overseas.
“We are currently developing our own no-code job management system using a team of developers in the UK. This technology will allow us to automatically take an online enquiry from our website, and run it all the way through to job scheduling – without the need for human manual intervention until our operative/cleaner arrives on site.”
The growth has been rapid. “We’ve added three or four vans a year and we’ll do the same this year. We launched nationwide last year and we are taking on government contracts and tenders. Our bread and butter is residential. We have also teamed up with partners in other parts of the country like Cork and Limerick.”
Window and gutter cleaning, Joyce says, is just the start. His ambition is to grow The Cleaning Company into a fully-fledged facilities management business.
“We are adding AI and route planning technologies to the system we are developing. Our ambition is to become a household name. When you think of cleaning or painting jobs, we want you to think of us.
“We currently have around 3,000 subscription customers and another 1,000 who use our services on a more ad hoc basis. Overall we would have between 4,000 and 5,000 regular customers in the greater Dublin area and 200 in Cork and Limerick.
“The key is to make it easy for people, provide transparent pricing, and we’ll be launching three new services this year.”
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